Smart quotes in RTF?

[ogghead]

I have a number of books I've converted from Microsoft's .lit format to RTF. I like RTF because it's an open (enough) format and displays nearly as well as LRF on the Sony Reader.

I use ABC Lit Converter to create the RTF and then format it in OpenOffice. (I've also tried the same process, but converted to plain text and also tried MS Word.)

I cannot get "smart quotes" to show up as anything other than blocky characters or garbage on the Reader, although the documents look great in WordPad, MS Word, or OpenOffice. Same goes for the curly version of the apostrophe.

I'm using the same fonts the Reader does per someone's suggestion, but no luck. In the interim, I converted them all to standard quotes, but the true typeset opposing quotes look so much better, I'd love to know how to preserve them in RTF.

[cats]

i got the same problem, very annoying, i tried to re-format it in Word, since my problem is all the " " and ' turns to ?, when i replace them all, i have to do it twice, first replace all ? to ", then replace all "" to ?", and leave all the words, like we're or you'd as we"re and you"d.

[UncleDuke]

I thought I was the only one with that problem. Thanks for the info.

[scotty1024]

Sounds like a codepage problem to me.

When ABC lit convertor translated the HTML in the LIT file into RTF there was an implicit codepage conversion and the tool forgot to take care of converting certain character's codes between the two codepage's.

At the start of a BAEN RTF file you see the typical: {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252

That "\ansicpg1251" means all characters in the RTF file are in codepage 1252.

What "\ansicpg" do you find at the front of a ABC lit convertor RTF file?

[RWood]

When I used ABC Amber LIT Converter the ansicpg given was 0 (zero.) The exact outputcode was:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg0\uc1\deff0\deflang0\deflangfe0 {\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset1 Times New Roman;}

I use MS Word under WinXP and I have not encountered the problem if the single and double quotes were correct in the original document. I have had problems with this when converting from PDB files as many of them did not have "smart quotes" in them. (And judging from this preview box, MobileRead Forums also do not have them.)

[HarryT]

I've not had this problem with any of the Baen RTFs. It's easy enough, though, to convert the "smart quotes" into "straight quotes" before saving the file, if required.

[ogghead]

Yes, but preserving the "smart quotes" was the goal here.

I found that the lit2lrs tool does preserve smart quotes correctly in most cases, and generates BBeB books that look good to me. (Thanks, waykohler!) So I've ditched RTF in favor of that for now, but I believe the codepage suggestion is likely to be the key for RTF.

[Moonraker]

I don't care much for ABC's Amber Lit converter. I find it does strange things, loses a lot of formatting and often will add spaces in the wrong places. Sometimes thousand's of spaces which is tiresome to correct.

I prefer ConvertLit GUI. I don't know if it will handle smart quotes but it's worth a try.

Get it here:

http://dukelupus.pri.ee/

I think how successful the conversion is depends on how the lit file was created originally. If the Lit file was made with a Microsoft HTML coded file then this can cause problems and also increases the file size. I have found that a better lit is created using the MS "Filtered" HTML or MS RTF format. At least, I find that these convert back much nicer with little or no editing to do.

[scotty1024]

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg0\uc1\deff0\deflang0\deflangfe0 {\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset1 Times New Roman;}

I'd try converting that to

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1\deff0\deflang0\deflangfe0 {\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset1 Times New Roman;}

And see what happens with your smart quotes.